Saturday, 31 August 2013

I had never heard of this guy Trevor Noah before. This extract from his hour long show is probably the closest he got to political correctness. Dominic is spending a few days with me and brought the DVD along to show me. Like him, I thought it was hilarious. 'Why don't you put it on your blog?' he suggested. 'Because, Son, it is many megabytes and would take three years to upload.'

'Just put a clip on' he said. He could tell by my expression that I hadn't a clue how to do that.

He pushed me out of my chair, opened programs on my computer I never knew I had and within fifteen minutes had cut a clip out and recorded it in a format that vastly reduced the file size.

This clip is not only amusing, it is testament to my fourteen year old son's vastly superior computer literacy. I guess it won't be long before he is hacking into my bank account. What really pleases me though is that although he had just demonstrated all the symptoms exhibited by geeky computer nerds, he isn't. He chases girls, rides a motorcycle, can do doughnuts with my Jeep AND is brilliant with computers.

﻿

Dominic, bon vivant, virgin converter, discoverer of one of the rarest phasmids in the world, rally champion on two wheels and four, crocodile castrator, apprentice Bambi Basher, computer expert and hacker yet still stupid enough to photograph himself on the beach with my car after I expressly forbade him to take take it onto the beach.
L-R: Dominic (14), little Marta (6), Cristina (16) and Ritinha (17)
Lanky sod, isn't he?

Thursday, 29 August 2013

The neices
came for a visit. My they have grown. Dominic could ride a
motorcycle at four, could drive my car at nine and now with fourteen years can
comfortably handle my truck. I was astonished, therefore, when Cristina
at sixteen admitted she had never been behind the wheel of a car. Alex can't reach
the pedals of the Jeep but he can steer us all safely from the restaurant to
the shop site. He knows how to start the car, put it into gear and
release the handbrake. He knows how to adjust the seats and set the
aircon. For these reasons, I keep the keys on me all the time but,
although many would argue against teaching a child such things, I believe that
by familiarizing them with such activity early, by the time they hit the road,
they won't go crazy because it will all be old hat. They will be more
responsible as driving a motor vehicle will be nothing new to them. I
am forty years older than Dominic and fifty years older than Alex so, on
current form, I very much doubt I will be around to guide them through
their twenties. I need to teach them as much as I can now.

As a car to
learn in, a 5.7 litre V8 would perhaps not be the first
choice of a driving school but it was all I had to hand if we exclude a
three tonne truck with no power steering. I let Dominic drive us to a bit
of flat ground on the property just to give the girls a bit of confidence and
then let Cristina take over.

She stuck
it in gear and floored the accelerator. The car leapt forward as the rear
wheels dug in. My land is right next to a river and I could see we were
heading for a bath. I was in the passenger seat so I knocked the car into
neutral and applied the hand brake. Cristina, with eyes like bloody
saucers still had the throttle buried into the bulkhead and the valves were
about to exit through the bonnet so I killed the ignition.

'Not bad,'
I said, 'not bad at all' I thought about getting out and retracing our route so I could find my stomach which had been left way behind.

This wasn't
exactly the very best start. If she was terrified of the beast she would
never get the hang of it. I had to calm her down.

'Think
about your boyfriend,' I said.

I don't
have a boyfriend!' a shocked Cristina blurted out (far too quickly).

'If you
want to give your boyfriend a kiss,' I continued unperturbed, 'do you head butt
him and chew his face off, or do you caress his lips gently with yours?'﻿

Everyone in
the car, Ju, Ritinha, Dominic, burst out laughing.

‘Cristina,
I want you to kiss the throttle.Ge-ently, ever so gently, just kiss the throttle.Think of your boyfriend while you do it.’As I repositioned the car I hoped to hell he
hadn’t just jilted her.

She was
fine.She did figure of eights, learnt
how to do emergency stops confirming she knew the difference between the brake
and accelerator pedals.Oddly enough,
Ritinha who, at seventeen was the oldest, bottled out and refused to have a
go.Ju, at twelve, leapt at the
chance.She was miles better than
Cristina.She was so good, in fact, that
I let her loose in the car with Dominic in the passenger seat just to boost
their confidence even more.

I was doing
so well, instilling in the kids a sense of responsibility and then Dominic
asked me what oversteer was.

I suppose,
with the aid of diagrams and a lengthy explanation I could have got him to more
or less understand oversteer but I was by then quite thirsty so I thought I
would just stick him in the right hand seat and show him.

An officially middle aged fat bandit undoing all the good work he has done.

How can kids grow up to be responsible with me as an example?

There are many who suggest that English is the most expressive language in the world. I tend to disagree. There are words in German wholly comprehensible to Germans but bewilderingly complicated to translate. Schadenfreude is an example. It was so bloody complicated to explain, it has entered English usage in its own right. The word I am thinking of in this case is 'Vorfuhreffekt'. Basically what vorfuhreffekt means is that you can do something successfully over a thousand times but as soon as you demonstrate whatever unique skill you have in front of others, you will fuck up. And so it was with me at the Nurburgring back in '92 when a German film company wanted to film me leaving black stripes on the tarmac. I high sided 25,000 dollars worth of Ducati motorcycle and smashed both ankles. Obviously they were pissed off because it had cost them a lot of money to bring a film crew and all their equipment down but they weren't half as pissed off as I was, it was my motorcycle. That's vorfuhreffekt. As soon as I realised Cristina was filming me, I got the collywobbles and hadn't the guts to stick my boot in anymore and do a few real 360's which is why, right at the end of the vídeo you can hear the girls complain when I pull up and tell them I'm going home. They may be delightful, but I'm not rolling a Jeep for them so they will just have to be satisfied with a couple of rooster tails.

That was yesterday. I spoke to Josh next door and asked if I could charter one of their boats just to give the kids a run up the river. The charter has just been confirmed. I tossed Dominic a cool bag, told him to nip over to the shop and fill it with soft drinks and cookies. He came back and asked me if I could give them a lift over to Rico's. 'Bugger off!' I said chucking him the keys to the Jeep, 'I'm off for a shower, you can drive yourself.' I know it is only a matter of eight hundred metres; driving off my property and onto Rico's place but this was freedom and a whole lot more for him.

He is fourteen years old. In the passenger seat of the V8 Jeep he is driving he has a drop-dead-gorgeous girl with come-to-bed eyes and he is going to take her for a ride on the river. He probably won't get laid but at least he'll get an inkling of where to start. I wish my Dad had given me presents like that.

Wednesday, 28 August 2013

Gunter is
another big Boer who visits regularly to go fishing. He is also an electrical engineer.

At the
moment I have an electricity circuit spreading out like a spider’s web from a
fuze box fitted behind what will be the bar, the kitchen/toilet block with no
real circuits at all (I have an extension cable coming in through the window to
power the TV, fridge and computer) and a shop also fed off an extension cable.Considering that the lappa has a thatched roof,
twisted electrical cables and overloaded extension sockets with no earth
protection are an uncomfortable mix.If
I switch the toaster on, the lights go out.Everything is still temporary.I needed
to make it permanent, but safe.

Since the
contractor paid to do all this and everything else had gone bust, Marcia and I
were left with no choice but to bring someone else in to finish the job.Marcia arranged an electrician and he now
holds the record for the fastest time between turning up on site and getting
sacked.He lasted less than ten
minutes.I was trying to explain to him
what I wanted. I want a bloody great
distribution board here, I told him.He
said I did not need it.I want a three
position heavy duty switch here so that I can connect the generator to it.He said I did not need one.I want fuse boxes fitted to the kitchen and
the canteen.He rolled his eyes, said
something in Portuguese to his mate I did not catch and they both laughed.

Marcia has
expressly forbidden me from punching anyone anymore, especially locals, so I
walked stiffly back to my room, poured myself a slug of scotch and lit a
cigarette.Thus calmed, I returned,
grabbed his tool bag and threw it back in his car.‘Podes ir embora’ I told them.They appeared confused and seemingly unable
to understand basic Portuguese.‘Fuck
Off!’ I told them.They’d seen enough
American films to understand that much English.

Unlike most
English contractors working abroad I have met, Gunter’s only ambition is to
earn as much as he needs in order to pay for what he really wants to do, with
his family back home.Not for him the
distraction of bars, discos and whorehouses.

‘I’ll pay
cash,’ I finished as I closed my pitch to Gunter.I needed a professional and he was standing
in front of me, all ten feet of him.

Three days
later he was back and fitted the humungous switch I wanted.

‘Let me
know when you want the permanent feed cut off so you can connect,’ I told him.

‘No need,’
he replied.

Now this I
had to see.

The
photograph below shows a true professional making a temporary live connection.

Look closely at the fingertips of his right hand.
He has just wrapped them up with insulating tape so he can work on live cables!
That isn't my head he has in an armlock, btw, that is his knee.

Clearly, this is the right man for the job. He is due back at the weekend and will do everything in only two days.

Wednesday, 21 August 2013

It was a
bit of an uncomfortable night the night before last but I did finally nod off
at about 4 am.Why is
it that all the programmes I like on the TV are shown after midnight?Last night I watched Midsomer Murders.This episode had Inspector Barnaby mulling over his aged mother’s
concern that too many septuagenarians were popping their clogs in the nursing
home in which she had a bunk.

I know it
was the early hours of the morning and I was slightly distracted by the unseen
beastie repeatedly stabbing my chest, arm and eyeball but even in my
debilitated state, this stretched my imagination a bit.With a violent death rate only surpassed by
that of a professional and well supplied firing squad, who in Midsomer Puddle,
or whatever the bloody village is called, would ever make it to retirement?Barnaby may be a good detective but, as a
resident, I’d start to wonder about a police force content to solve brutal
assault rather than prevent three or four murders an episode.

Still, it
was the palliative I needed and allowed me to reflect on what, the previous day,
had been a truly horrible day.

It started
out, as such days invariably do, very well.I had been waiting weeks for the arrival of our imported generator which
still had not cleared the port.I had
convinced Marcia to buy a 45 Kva generator off the local market in the interim.We could always use it as a back up once the
big gennie arrived.In the meantime, we
could get into our new house and I could crack on with opening the restaurant.

I had not enjoyed
any internet access for nearly a week so decided I would take the boy over to
Rico’s place, feed him lunch and bum their internet access code so I could pull
all my emails down off their wireless network.Just as we were arriving, Marcia rang to say she had found a brand new
45 Kva Perkins for US$6,000.

‘Is it
silenced?’ I asked only a few feet from a well made rum and coke served over
Rico’s bar.

‘I’ll call
you back,’ she said.

Cool, I
thought as I grabbed the drink.

I had just
served Alex a plate of swordfish cutlets and chicken drumsticks and started to
download my emails and upload my most recent posts when the phone rang again.

‘The
generator will be there in a few minutes, get to the site’

It was an
order, not a request.

Now this
was pretty much a bleeding miracle.In
the time it had taken me to serve Alex his plate and collect my Cuba Libre
(Free Cuba, what we call Rum and Cokes here), Marcia had been able to drive all
the way from the city with a generator.I started to smell something pretty close to a done deal here.After all, she hadn’t rung me back to say it
was silenced or not.I guessed I had
just bought a generator whether I liked it or not.I prefer Cummins but a 45kva, hopefully
silenced Perkins for six grand delivered here in Angola ain’t that bad and the
only thing holding us up was a decent generator, our new one having been stolen
two days before we moved down to the site.

‘Get that
food down yer neck quick, Son, we’re off to the site’ I said as I came back to
the table and slugged my Cuba Libre.

‘They have
ice cream!’ wailed Alex.

‘Ice
cream?’

‘Yes,
Daddy’

A badly
needed generator is one thing.Vanilla
ice cream entirely another.I have it on
the very best authority that if a child does not enjoy at least one over full
bowl of ice cream per month, they overheat and die.I am not a child care nutritionist but I
wasn’t willing to take a chance with my own son’s life.Besides, I fancied a bloody great bowl of ice
cream as well.

By the time
I got to the site, they had already bogged the truck in.I don’t have a driveway see, just a ditch and
lots of sand.I could have pointed that
out to them had they waited.I could
have pointed out all the timber I have lying around with which we could have
quickly made a temporary driveway but they had pressed ahead anyway and now
they were stuck.I am not stupid so when
I bailed out of Rico’s place in such a hurry, I had nicked the bottle of rum
and a carton of juice for Alex so the two of us made ourselves comfortable on
the veranda of the new shop while we watched one monumental fuck up after
another without me getting involved.Marcia hates it when I get involved sometimes but there was no chance of
that.This was a clear case of it being
their truck and their job to drop the gennie on its concrete base so I had no
intention of getting involved.My only
regret was that I did not have my camera with me.Some sights, such as a large lorry buried up
to its axles in my garden and the ever more frantic attempts to free it should
be recorded.

Finally,
the crane swung the generator from the truck and onto the concrete base and I
had my first opportunity to inspect it.

I have
lived with Marcia for over eight years and still don’t understand her
completely.She could be described as
very patient yet at the same time she can be incredibly impatient.She plans well ahead and then surprises me by
being impetuous.Despite my well
demonstrated love for and devotion to her as well as my absolute fidelity, she
is insecure and can be insanely jealous.I had to be very careful therefore, how I pointed out the various
discrepancies with what was written on the six thousand dollar invoice and what
was actually now sitting by the side of my new house.

Marcia was
expecting and had the cash ready to pay for a brand new 45 Kva generator.What I was looking at was not brand new.I lifted the exhaust flap and wiped my
fingers inside.They came out
black.Even before I opened the doors I
could see crudely chopped off cables so I knew the gennie had been hooked
up.I opened the doors and checked the
hour meter; 5,400 odd hours, a bit more than just delivery miles.Then I checked the specification label; 16 Kw.

Marcia
likes to do things by herself.She has
an ardent desire to prove herself as competent as the best.But she is young and is still unaware of the
many ways evil people will scam the gullible and innocent.

I looked at
the oily shit who had turned up in the flash 4x4 accompanying the truck to whom
Marcia was about to give $6,000 and really had to fight hard to overwhelm the
sudden urge I had to ‘get involved’.

If, on the
other hand, I told Marcia she had been duped, that she had stupidly fallen
victim to yet another Angolan scam, she would have been very upset and angry
with me for slighting her in public.If
I even suggested that she had bought a heap of shit, I’d be testicle-less and
penis-less dead meat.

‘Marcia?’ I
called to her, ‘I think they have made a mistake and delivered the wrong
generator!’

‘What?’

‘Come and
look,’ I said, ‘look at this, it is only 16 Kw, they must have loaded the wrong
one!’

Having lit
the blue touch paper, I just stood back and became decidedly uninvolved again.Well, sort of.I called one of my labourers over,
Abrão.I stand a head taller than he
does but he is built like Mike Tyson.I
explained to him what was going down, that these guys were trying to scam
Marcia, that Marcia was dealing with it but if he could just get a couple of
the other lads and keep an eye on the situation in case the gennie guys tried
to get nasty.

Now I
hadn’t succumbed to my first instinct and called these guys thieving scamming
bastards and had, instead, merely suggested they had made a simple mistake and
loaded the wrong generator.Marcia was
also towing the same line when I rejoined the group the conversation amongst
the members of which was becoming heated.

‘Meus
Senhors!’ I said as expansively and all embracing as I could.‘Gentlemen, there has obviously been a
terrible mistake.Just reload the
generator, take it back and bring us the correct one. No harm done!’

‘I still
want paying,’ said the truck driver, not to me thankfully (he was a big bastard
as well) but to the oily generator salesman.

‘Of course
you do!’ I said all sweetness and light, ‘It isn’t your fault that this man,’ I
indicated Oily, ‘loaded the wrong generator and now you must load it again and
take it all the way back to Luanda.How much extra is that going to cost?’

Having set
the cat amongst the pigeons, I gave the generator a good going over.Made in Spain, not bad.Obviously it had been well serviced as I
could see the inspection tags neatly filled in.I started it and the exhaust fumes were clear and it ran oh so quiet.It was three phase rather than the single
phase we wanted and a lot less power but, still, it was a good generator.

It was also
stolen.I had no doubt whatsoever that
this generator had been stolen.If you
are going to move a generator, you disconnect the cables, you don’t chop
through them with bolt croppers.Yes,
they had a set of keys but, believe me, people tend to leave the keys in their
generators so that they don’t lose them and can start and stop the damn thing
on demand, after all, it is safely parked on their property, isn’t it?.There were no spare keys or owners manuals
and they wanted cash.The more I looked
around it, the more nervous Oily became.He thought he had been dealing with Marcia, a girl he had clearly
underestimated and now he was dealing with me.This thing had been nicked as sure as I am a fat reclusive alcoholic
with a very bad temper if riled.I
rejoined the group.

‘Load it up
and let’s get out of here,’ I announced.

‘Hang on a
sec,’ said the truck driver getting all menacing, ‘I want my money or I’m not
going anywhere!This is my Dad’s truck
and he’ll kill me if I don’t come home with some money’

A perfectly
reasonable attitude to adopt, I thought.After all, an honest tradesman deserves his consideration.

‘Who
chartered the load?’ I asked him.

‘He did!’
he said pointing to Oily.

‘And how
much does he owe you?’ I asked.

‘Five
hundred in cash.’

‘Well,’ I
said to Oily, ‘It looks like you owe this man five hundred and, if you want
your generator back, you owe him another five hundred.’ and walked off without
upsetting Marcia by ‘getting involved’.

‘I’m not
leaving here without my money!’ Oily bawled.

Just at
that moment the truck carrying all the timber for my restaurant cottages
hurtled by.

‘Suit
yourself,’ I said, ‘I’m off!’ and climbed into the Jeep to chase after my
timber.

As I
climbed in, Abrão came up to the driver’s window.‘Are we really going to load the generator up
again?’

‘Nooo!You just do what I asked you to do and look
after Marcia’

I charged
up the road after my truckload of timber.While I was driving, I called Marcia.

‘Offer them
a thousand dollars cash,’ I told her when she answered, ‘no more and make it
clear to the truck driver that if they accept it, he gets his five hundred
bucks in cash from us otherwise it’s no deal and he deals with them.’

‘But they
want six,’ said Marcia.

‘I know,
love, just hit ‘em with a grand and see what they say, trust me’

I was just
catching up with the timber truck when my mobile rang.

‘They’ll
take fifteen hundred plus the five for the driver,’ Marcia told me.

I knew it
was stolen.

‘Do the
deal,’ I said.Fifteen hundred plus
transport is what you would pay for a portable gennie.

I did not
have time to consider the fact I had not only handled stolen goods, I had
received them.Now I needed to unload
twenty cubic metres of wood on the restaurant site.

‘Where’s
your crew?’ the driver asked.

‘I paid
delivery,’ I said, ‘delivery means on the ground’

‘Suit
yourself,’ he said, ‘I’m going back to Luanda, take it up with my boss in the
morning but I am not unloading this truck,’Inside the cab sat a doe eyed beauty in an impossibly short pink lycra
dress which left nothing to the imagination.
What was it someone once said to me? Nipples like cigar butts stabbed into Jaffa Cakes. I always preferred the expression, 'like chapel hat pegs.' In the driver’s position, I’d be in a bloody hurry too.

Oh, how the
tables had been turned.

‘Give me
five minutes!’ I pleaded.‘Let me get
you a cold beer from the shop,’ I offered, ‘maybe a Bacardi Breezer for the
lady, just give me five minutes, please?’

I rushed
into the shop.There were three guys
there drinking beer.‘How much have they
drunk,’ I demanded off the Boy.‘A
couple each,’ he said.Good, they’re
probably still sober, I thought.‘How
would you guys like to earn a bottle of whisky apiece to unload my truck?’ I
asked them.They didn’t say anything but
their body language, as they rushed en-masse out of the door suggested, ‘bring
it on’.

There was a
lot of bloody wood and we needed to be quick so I dived in and helped.

I was lying
on the bed with my chest on fire when Marcia brought me a cup of tea.

‘We’re
ready to go’, said Marcia as she sat on the back of the sofa to be close to me
(that’s how small our accommodation is).It was true.We were ready to
go.The team was in, the wood had
arrived, next week we could be sleeping in our new house and cracking on with the
restaurant.

‘Do you
remember how we felt when they stole our generator?’ I asked her.

‘Do you
really think this generator was stolen?’ she asked.

I immediately
regretted saying that.Alex will soon
enjoy an air-conditioned bedroom with his own flatscreen TV and iPad.Marcia will have her flash kitchen complete
with dishwasher (a complete waste of bloody time since I could employ
a dishwasher here for a little over a hundred bucks a month).I would have an office area and shelves on
which I could store my rotting book collection. For the first time in nearly two years, we
would have bedrooms separated from the lounge, a dining area, hot and cold
running water in a bathroom we can enter from within the house.I would be able to open the fridge door
without first having to ask everyone present to breathe in and would have a veranda on which I could relax while trainee waitresses clad in impossibly short pink lycra dresses with nipples like organ stops (seriously, at my age I'm not too fussy when it comes to nipples) serve me ice cold pink gins.

I needed this
generator.I know I should have sent a
runner off to the local police station not 1500
metres distant.But what would that
have achieved?The thieves would have
clammed up or even implicated Marcia.The
generator would have been confiscated and in all probability ended up powering
a police station.There would have
followed hours of giving statements, all painfully recorded by hand.My family and I would still be living in 16
square metres, them hating me with every breath they drew and Marcia damning my
conscience to Hell.

‘Of course
not, Marcia’, I said, ‘you just played hard ball with them and they caved.I’m sorry I couldn’t be there while you were
negotiating but you really got yourself a good deal’

‘I am good
at it, aren’t I?’ she said.

‘You’re the
best, Marcia,’ and I meant that on so many levels.

Let me live
with the guilt.Right now, there is
someone out there who feels as bad as we did back then when our brand new
generator was stolen but when I am tucking Alex into his own bed in his own
bedroom before joining Marcia in hers, I am sure I won’t feel half as bad.

Friday, 16 August 2013

I owe a lot of people replies, I will get round to it. I spent the day unloading a generator from a truck that dug itself in meaning we had to dig it out again and then had to unload another truck loaded with wood for the new huts on my other piece of land. My heart feels as if it is about to burst out of my chest. The pain is intense and reaches all the way across my chest, down my left arm and right to the top of my head. I think my left eyeball is about to burst.

So I am going to have a fag and a whisky, dose myself up with Inderal tablets and a squirt or two of Nitrrolingual and go to bed and hope I get a few hours decent kip before Cro Magnon and the other seniors boot me out of bed to give me a good kicking for blubbing in the dorm.

The whole
interweb thingy connection has gone down, again. Usually it is only for a few hours,
occasionally a whole day.Mine has now
been down for many days, hence three posts at the same time.I am now sat over at Rico's place using his
connection while Alex enjoys lunch but Marcia has just rung me to say the new
generator has arrived so I have to rush off to the site. Three posts, one after the other.Enjoy.

Me?I am stressed to hell. I will reply to all your comments later but, right now, I have to dash again.

When I
first came here, there were no international communications.Only correctly registered international
corporations could have international direct dialling.To get just a local phone installed took
ages.To make an international call
using one of these, you had to call and call and call the international
operator and once through, hope that he or she would actually open the
connection and call you back to complete it.Using this system, it was only worth the effort if I phoned people who
knew that I was in a Lusophone country AND were willing to talk to me,
otherwise the guy at the other end, hearing someone babbling to him in Pork and
Cheese would hang up.I didn’t make many
phone calls.I could receive faxes from
HQ in London but only through the press centre in down town Luanda, right next
to the Foreign Relations building in which, not so many years before, they had
tried, convicted and sentenced four British Mercenaries to death by firing
squad.It doesn’t pay to be on the
losing side in this environment.There
were no such things as satellite phones, mobile phones or email.I went months without talking to any member
of my family in Europe.

Back in ‘95,
an old mate of mine in the British Forces Broadcasting Service read on the news
wires that an ex-British Army Officer had been killed in Angola.He assumed it was me and announced my demise on air, explaining to his
listeners how he had introduced me to Harrison Ford as the real Indiana Jones
while Mr Ford was filming Mosquito Coast in Belize and how, although sad, it was
perhaps appropriate such a free spirit should die in the wilds of Africa.It was all terribly moving apparently.He then dedicated a Rolling Stone’s track to me before playing it.

Axel Berg,
a very good friend of mine from motorcycle racing days in Germany heard the broadcast and rang my
brother in Stuttgart to commiserate.Micky, in a state of profound shock, rang the
rest of the family.None had heard the
news.He rang the Foreign Office.They hadn’t a clue but promised to contact
the British Embassy in Luanda.Last Micky had heard I was up country running diamond security teams for
de Beers so he rang them.

De Beers
did have international phones and they really do care about their employees but
I was nevertheless surprised when I was standing in the Codiam buying office at
Serpa Pinto in Luanda having just got back from Lucapa with a shipment of diamonds and the
boss called me over to the phone.

‘It’s yer
brother, apparently you are dead and I forgot to notify Head Office,’ he said
dryly before handing me the receiver and like all good managers, going off
about his business.

Cool!I had never been dead before and wondered if
I could collect on my Death-in-Service insurance and fuck off to that beach bar
in Belize I always dreamt about.

‘Oh, thank
God you’re still alive!’ Micky blubbed down the phone.

‘Bollocks,’
I said, ‘being alive has just cost me quarter of a million and my ticket out of
this shithole.’

It seems
bizarre then, given I have been used to no communications at all, that only a
few days incommunicado should irritate me but irritate me it has.I rang Marcia in town and complained.

‘Good!’ she
said, ‘Maybe you’ll get off yer arse and fit the kitchen,’ and hung up.

‘Gosh! Her
English is improving,’ I thought.

The thing
is, I have been fitting her kitchen.First I had to work out the jigsaw puzzle.Then I had to figure a way around all the
missing bits and repair the damaged-in-transit bits.Then Marcia rejected the first layout, the
one she had agreed and I had designed and built the house around, so I had to
reposition all the cabinets again, which meant the plumbing for the sink and
dishwasher, and the electrics for the oven and extractor hood were on the wrong
walls.The house is built from sturdy,
double panelled timber so it was easy during the build to hide all cables and
pipework.Swapping everything around
would mean either ripping all the interior kitchen walls off or surface
mounting everything, neither option appealing to me.Fortunately, the house is built on stilts. As
I, together with the plumber and the electrician pondered the problem, the
solution came to me.

‘Drill
straight through the floor,’ I decided, ‘and run everything underneath the
house.’

There then
followed a discussion about the size of the holes necessary.The dishwasher requires a water inlet, a
waste water outlet and a supply of electricity.The cable was fitted with a chunky UK standard plug.

‘Cut the
cable,’ I told the electrician.

The water
inlet has a device the size of a packet of butter at the end of the pipe just
where it is supposed to screw onto the water inlet pipe.I have no idea what it does but I assume
there was a good reason Bosch thought the extra expense was worth it so
rejected the plumber’s suggestion to just cut it off and fit a new union to the
pipe once it had been passed through the floor.This resulted in quite a sizeable hole.

‘We will
have to fill the gaps,’ pointed out the plumber, ‘else snakes will get into the
house’

‘I never
considered that,’ I admitted, ‘don’t bother filling the gaps’

‘But, Sr
Tomas!’ he exclaimed, ‘Snakes!’

‘Snakes
perhaps,’ I said, ‘but no rats.’I hate
rats and I really like snakes that eat rats.

With all
the floor cabinets fitted and the plumbing and power supply decided upon, I
started to fit the cabinet doors.The
hinges come in three parts and have to be assembled and screwed to the doors
and then the cabinet carcass.Naturally,
and with my experience of this UK supplied kitchen so far, I wasn’t
in the least bit bloody surprised that none, not one of the pre-drilled holes
lined up.And this is the problem with
buying ‘bespoke’ kitchens.They’re not
really.Bespoke is when craftsmen turn
up on site to chisel and plane away wood and make it fit.This company’s idea of bespoke is to run
through all the permutations offered by a massive bin of generic parts made in China and cobble together something that
almost, but never quite fits and leaves the client to sort it out.I probably have cabinets from their Lancashire range and doors from the Yorkshire range.Hardly a marriage made in heaven.

The door
hinges came with something called ‘soft close’. I didn’t know that as among the other things
the supplier had omitted to supply was an installation manual. As I ripped the hinge packs open, I noticed
these strange hydraulic devices and hadn’t a clue what they were.The doors seemed to open and close perfectly
well without them.‘But they must have
been included for a reason?’ I reasoned.So I fiddled around.I played
with the three bits comprising a hinge trying the components first this way,
then that.Alex thought this was a
brilliant game and happily kept me company.I lit a cigarette and poured myself a scotch into the cut down plastic
water bottle I was using as a glass to help me overcome the enormous sense of
frustration overwhelming me before having another go.

‘No, Daddy,
you are doing it wrong!’ Alex exclaimed, ‘you do it this way!’ and proceeded to
assemble in the blink of an eye, a perfect soft close hinge.

‘Wow!’ I
said.I tossed him another bag of hinge
bits.‘Do it again.’And he did.It was so simple, it was child’s play.

Under
Alex’s supervision, I retrofitted all the installed hinges with the soft close
component.I tried slamming the doors as
hard as I could.I tried just gently
nudging them closed.It made no
difference.Two inches short of fully
closed, the door slowed to a snail’s pace and quietly settled into place as if
guided by an Angel’s hand.The last time
I had seen doors as well behaved as these was on Star Trek.I called the plumber and let him have a
go.‘Brilliant!’ he exclaimed.I called the electrician so he could have a
go as well, ‘Amazing!’ he said.For the
next ten minutes, all three of us played with the doors as men do when they are
supposed to be working (thank God there are no nail guns on site) and then
Marcia got back from town.

All the
base units had been fitted and levelled.The dishwasher positioned, the built in oven fitted.

‘What do
you think?’ I asked Marcia, ‘and get a load of these doors!’ I continued,
giving her a demonstration.

‘Is that
where the fridge is going to go?’ she asked.I nodded, my enthusiasm slightly deflated.I wasn’t expecting her to give me a blow job
there and then but a few ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ and maybe a peck on the cheek would
have been nice.

‘I think it
would look nicer over there,’ she said pointing to a wall bereft of electrical
connections.

I had made
the beef jerky stew, the red cabbage was delicious, the beans were cooked
nicely and I had just put the rice on when Marcia rang.

‘Can you
pick me up from the main road, please?’

‘I thought
you were in the truck?’ I said.

‘They can’t
load the new generator tonight,’ she said, ‘so Roddie will stay in town with
the truck.I came back by taxi’

Oh bugger
me effing sideways.That means she is
going to be bloody tired and in a really, really bad mood.Thank Christ I had dinner more or less
prepared.

‘Alex!’ I
shouted, ‘get yer kit on!We have to
collect Marcia from the Curva!’

‘I’m
watching Ben 10!’ he complained, ‘You said it was my turn!’

This was
true.All day he had been faced with a
choice: play by himself or watch the Ashes.I know England have retained the Ashes but it is
nice to see that someone has plugged the Aussies into a charger and they are
now giving England a run for their money.No sportsman feels comfortable with a
whitewash; it’s the close ones that earn bragging rights.

‘Righto,
son, I’ll see you in a bit!’

‘I’m
coming, Daddy, I’m coming!’ he shouted leaping off the sofa.

Marcia
hates to be kept waiting and I don’t like the idea of her standing on the
corner of a main road in the dark with every trucker hauling his rig up
thinking she is a prostitute up for a free ride.

‘Where’re
your shoes, son?’

‘I’ve found
one, I don’t know where the other one is!’

‘Bugger it,
we’re only going to the main road and back, go barefoot!’

‘But I want
my shoes, Daddy!’

There’s no
arguing with him.He wants to go with me
but only with his shoes and I am in a bleeding hurry. I scrabbled like a crab
all over the floor.

‘Here! Here
is your shoe!Let’s get going!’

‘My
biscuits, Daddy!’ he wailed.

Bollocks.Talk about a rod for my own back.Every time Alex and I rode in the truck and
now in the Jeep, he gets a packet of biscuits to munch on.It’s a thing we do. He would scoff a
biscuit and then hand me one.We always
made a big deal out of it.I was driving
so he had to feed me since I couldn’t take my hands off the steering
wheel. It is little things like that which help us bond.

I ran down
the shop and grabbed a pack of choccie chip cookies.

‘Ready?’ I
asked him as I settled behind the steering wheel and started the engine.

‘No, it's
too hot,’ he replied fiddling with every knob on the dash.

I stabbed
the aircon button and set off at a lick.

It is three
clicks to the main road.There is some
tarmac but it is only what’s left from colonial days.Basically it is just one pothole after
another.I misjudged and hit a
particularly big one launching the car violently into the air.

‘Do you
want to live alone?’ Alex asked me.

‘Eh?’ I
replied.

‘If you
kill me, you'll have to live alone,' he explained.

How does
this kid's mind work? He's not supposed to understand irony at his age!

I slowed
down. Alex and I shared chocolate chip cookies, I let him fiddle with the
stereo and the aircon. This was a real Man moment. We were
cruising. Two blokes together.

Last night
Ria’s husband Jaco, a mountain of a man, a true Afrikaner with only the most
basic grasp of de rooinek sprache (English), decided to cook a Potje.Except he pronounced it ‘Poikey’ but assured
me it was spelt ‘Potje’.Mind you, being
a true Afrikaner, if you asked him what he was wearing the night before, don’t
be too dismayed (if you are a lover of the English language) to hear him reply,
‘I were wearing a blue jeans pant’.

A potje is
basically a stew made with meat, vegetables, herbs and spices in a heavy cast
iron pot very reminiscent of a mini witch’s cauldron.This pot is placed onto glowing charcoal and
left for hours.Traditionally they were
placed on the glowing embers of a fire in the morning and left all day, the
food being ready in the evening.They
were the original slow cookers and were just added to as the food within was
consumed.It certainly must have saved
on the washing up.

The
resultant stew is delicious; the meat tender (don’t forget, sometimes they were
cooking with some pretty tough cuts) and the gravy rich.If they were eating this morning, noon and night, no wonder the average Afrikaner
is twice the size of the equivalent Homo Sapiens to which they can only be
loosely related.

Jako’s
potje was no exception.I am not given
to over eating, most of my calories come in liquid form, but I surprised
everyone by going for seconds.

So why am I
writing a post about something mundane as a stew?

Well it is
all to do with people such as Ian Hutson, Cro Magnon, Yorkshire Pudding, George
(of the Flee and Float, not the jungle), the Fifth Columnist et al.They ALL take beautiful photographs.It seems that every blog I follow is enhanced
with stunning photographs.Even gay
Welsh raconteurs take better pictures than me.The photos on my blog are not just amateurish, they are crap. I love
photography.I have an expensive digital
SLR with interchangeable lenses.I
bought it because I read all the reviews and it had the most stars on Amazon in
my price range.Well, if it so good and
I can’t be bothered to read and digest the mammoth instruction manual so just
set it to automatic in the expectation it will do it all for me, why does it
take such rubbish photos?The thing that
really irritates me about it is the pop up flash.It will not go off when I want it to and will
go off when I don’t.I really wanted to
take a photo of the witch’s cauldron steaming on its bed of glowing charcoal
but the flash kept going off, the resultant photo being, as usual, crap.I tried placing my hand in front of the flash
but then the camera would not focus and not take a photo.Everyone had a fiddle with it.We pushed buttons, we entered and were
quickly lost in a maze of menus, the battery died, I fitted a fresh one from
the charger, we finally found a way to disable the flash and then it wouldn’t
take a picture at all.In the meantime,
the pot bubbled.

I framed
the shot of the pot.I then put my left
hand on top of the pop up flash to physically prevent it doing what it was
designed to do and pressed the shutter release.I heard the beep beep of the auto focus and the click of the flash
release.Obviously, with my maw holding
the flash down, when the shutter released, if it did flash, the camera flashed
its own guts.

My handling
of the camera may have been slightly unorthodox but I was nevertheless quite
pleased with the result:

Monday, 12 August 2013

Naturally,
I have been thinking about his schooling.I have not just been thinking about his schooling, God knows if you are a
regular reader of my blog you will know I have been losing sleep over this and
any number of other issues.

Acknowledged
as the finest school in Angola is the LuandaInternationalSchool.It offers the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme and
operates under the auspices of the ‘New England Association of Schools and
Colleges.’ The NEASC eh? So I looked them up.

"The New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) provides
accreditation services for more than 2000 public and private
institutions in the six state region - Pre-K through university. NEASC
accreditation uses self-reflection, peer review and best practices as
integral components of its assessment process."

I know that I am a cynical old soak but I understand that Marcia wants the very best
for her first born and only son so I handled her gently when she brought me the
prospectus for the LuandaInternationalSchool that I was now dutifully flogging my way through, 'Umming' and 'Aahing' at regular intervals with as much conviction as TV chefs do tasting their own dishes on camera as I flipped the pages.

‘International
Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme’ sounds to me more like Microsoft Office
Home Edition rather than Microsoft Office Professional.Understandably I wanted to know whether this
school was a registered Baccalaureate exam centre and what their pass rate was.There was nothing at all in the prospectus
answering either question. The only thing I could find was on their very thin Wikipedia entry which stated: 'The IB Middle Years Programme is being implemented in grades 8-10'. So it's not ready yet then? That's what you're saying on your website, isn't it? Be honest.

New England
Association of Schools and Colleges sounds more provincial than international
to me.In fact it sounds just like those
irritating adverts Google throws up at its users offering International on-line
degrees with the CambridgeUniversityCollege the whereabouts of the campus of
which is uncertain since no one has been able to locate them in Cambridge (one of the two main university
cities in England).

Determined
not to piss Marcia off by screwing the prospectus up into a tight ball and
using it to light my barbecue, I read on:

“The
most significant and distinctive feature of the IB Primary Years Programme is
the six transdiciplinary themes."

Is the six transdisciplinary themes? Is? Since there are no less than six features, surely it should read "The most significant and distinctive features of the IB Primary Years Programme are the six transdiciplinary themes."

"These
themes are about the issues that have meaning for, and are important to all of
us.The programme offers a balance
between learning about or through the subject areas, and learning
beyond them.The six themes of
global significance create a transdisciplinary framework that allows students
to ‘step up’ beyond the confines of learning within subject areas”

What on
earth does that mean?I have quoted this
faithfully from the prospectus, as written and punctuated including the words
in bold type so would be grateful if anyone with a reasonable command of the
English language could enlighten me.

“The six
transdisciplinary themes help teachers to develop a programme of inquiries-in-depth
investigations into important ideas, identified by the teachers, and requiring
a high level of involvement on the part of the students.These inquiries are substantial, in-depth and
usually last for several weeks”

If I sent
my child to school and he wasn’t highly involved, I’d be a bit annoyed.So if the curriculum consists of a series of
inquiries-in-depth investigations each lasting several weeks, what are they?

Who we are

Where we
are in place and time

How we
express ourselves

How the
world works

How we
organise ourselves

Sharing the
planet

Blimey.Answer all those questions and you'd be up for
a Nobel Peace Prize.

‘Whatever
happened to the three R’s?’ I thought to myself as I struggled through pages of
this drivel to the end of the prospectus.I want little Alex to learn how to read, to write and do sums, not learn
how to hug trees and knit yoghurt.I had
this horrible vision of Alex as a teenager having attended this school running
down Oxford Street with his hair in dreadlocks smashing up shop
windows clutching a placard demanding Land Rights for Gay Whales.

I then
turned to the insert to the prospectus, the fee schedules.

Annual
fee:US$35,448

Registration
and Annual Facility Fee:US$15,000

Let me
remind you, as if you weren’t already suffering the same heart palpitations as
I was and were, like me, hurriedly reaching for your Inderal heart tablets and Nitrolingual spray,
this is a DAY school, not a boarding school.US$50,448 per annum.If you want
your child to join the other children for lunch, by the way, that is an extra
US$1,915.Christ Almighty, this is the sort of fee prestigious boarding schools charge in UK, schools who in return for the fee all but guarantee your son a career in the City or a Commission in one of the three services afterwards. Universities only charge £9,000 (US$14,400) per annum.

Just
reading the curriculum in the prospectus I began to wonder what planet these
people were on.Having seen the fees I
am now convinced they are part of a solidly grounded organisation the sole
purpose of which is to scam the desperate.

I am unsure
how to conclude this post.Even after
sleeping on it a night, I am still in shock.I would gladly pay the fifty grand a year if I was convinced it was a
good school, but I am not willing to pay that much just so Alex can learn how to
share the planet and, and… hug trees and knit fucking yoghurt.

I am faced
with three choices:swallow gallons of
backward running spit and send him to the InternationalSchool; consign him to the truly awful
Angolan system; or send a five year old abroad to boarding school.It would break my heart to be separated from
yet another of my boys.

Answers on
a post card please.

PS: I am just about desperate enough to offer YP 50 grand a year to tutor Alex and send him to a local Yorkshire school but then I know I would see my boy on Sky News smashing up Oxford Street and stealing frocks from Harvey Nichols.

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The boring bit

I first came to Africa in the early 90's, supposedly for one year. Six months in Mozambique followed by six months in Angola and then home again. Over 20 years later, I am still here.
I have gone where the jobs were, in mine clearance, security, the oil industry, anything that would put bread on the table. I have a farm in southern Angola and am building a lovely restaurant and hotel on the banks of the Rio Kwanza where the river spills into the Atlantic ocean. I am 55 years old, have two sons aged 16 and 6, a longtime girlfriend 21 years my junior, three dogs and a fine goose which we keep meaning to eat at Christmas but somehow never do.